Print

Mail

wiki links

Google ups stakes in Web turf battle

In the tit-for-tat battle between Yahoo and Google to gain an edge in tailoring Internet searches to narrow geographic markets, Google planned to announce yesterday that it will start offering companies the option of local advertising limited to Internet users in select regions.

The move follows Yahoo's introduction last month of SmartView, which allowed it to get a jump on Google by creating a service for Web users that permits enhanced searches limited to a local area. Google echoed that move days later when it debuted Google Local, a product that even company officials acknowledge is still a work in progress. But the big money is in finding fresh ways to sell ads via the Internet.

Google is giving online merchants and other Web sites more options for tailoring their ads to local audiences.

Under the new program, a pet store in Boston, for instance, can specify that it wants to reach Google users in the Boston area only. Or a national company can have different ads run in San Francisco and Washington.

The new program affects the ads that run on the right side of search results, although Google is separately testing a local search service to customize the regular searches as well.

Advertisers targeting the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have the most options. They can specify cities or metropolitan areas they wish to target. Elsewhere, merchants can enter their address and a radius, in miles or kilometers, around which to target.

So an Indian merchant can type in a New Delhi address and have the ad appear on computers located within 50km of the business.

Web sites can also target advertisements based on their latitude and longitude.

Previously, businesses could specify only what country they wish to target, making the program prohibitively expensive for smaller merchants.

"Users will be better served with local business results," said Salar Kamangar, Google's director of product management. "We see it as a way to bring in useful local business relationships into the search process."

Google generally knows where a user lives based on the Internet Protocol, or IP, address associated with the computer being used.

Although technology for IP targeting has improved greatly in recent years, there are still cases where a location can be determined no better than a country or state. In those cases, Google would not display any localized ads to ensure greatest accuracy for the ads that do appear, Kamangar said.

Kamangar said Google will also guess location based on users' search terms, and users can enter that information when they test the local search service.

Meanwhile, Yahoo said it has been testing a similar program for several months and expects to release it in the coming weeks.

Localized paid word searches are only the latest volley in the much ballyhooed, closely-watched search engine wars in which Yahoo and Google are the leading players. This competition is playing out largely in two general areas, local search and what insiders call "personalization."

"Think of personalization this way," said Chris Winfield, who publishes an electronic newsletter called The Search Engine Market Insider.

"A search engine will know enough about you so that if you type in the word `bass,' it will know if you are interested in music and mean `bass guitar,' or whether your interest is in fishing," he said.

Beyond Google and Yahoo, any number of other companies are trying to figure out a way of building a better search engine as a way to gain entry into what is now seen as perhaps the most lucrative way to make money on the Internet.
This story has been viewed 2386 times.